Pahlav tips

[Justinian II]

What are some good tips and pointers for a first-time Pahlav player? How do the reforms work? What governments should I use? Obviously, infantry is going to be pretty useless for a long time...

I throw myself upon your mercy.

[socal_infidel]

I posted some tips on Pahlava in this thread (https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=102769) the other day.

I don't even bother with infantry with Pahlava (well except for garrisons). You can conquer the world with horse archers and cataphracts.

With horse-archers you really have to be prepared to fight every single battle. And you really need to send out horse-archers to confront an advancing army, empty their quivers and withdraw. Do this repeatedly and by the time the enemy lays siege (if it even gets to that), they'll be so thinned-out, victory will be easy. I'm in the midst of a Pahlava campaign, and I probably "lose" 3-4 battles for every battle I win. But I say, it ain't a loss if two horse archer units can collectively kill 250 units without a loss each battle.

Build nomadism where you can at first. Dahae riders are a good horse archer with a good charge.

Use spies to open gates. If this fails, the garrison will usually sally out soon enough because the game really underweighs HAs in auto-calc. I'm twenty years in my Pahlava 1.1 campaign, and I've taken 6 AS settlements without building a single siege engine or without any infantry.

Good luck. Once they get rolling, they are unstoppable.